Abstract
To write about clients is an established routine in countless institutional settings, regardless of the fact that clients themselves seldom feel that the produced texts mirror or summarize their experiences. But what, more specifically, is left unwritten when staff starts typing on the keyboard to insert a piece of daily life into the computer? This article draws on data on violent events in Swedish detention homes, covering, on the one hand, interview accounts collected by ethnographic researchers and, on the other hand, formal journal reports on the “same” event written by staff. The analysis of one case exemplifies what written versions of a violent ward drama omit or transform: staff members’ “separation work” of the fighting actors and their local manufacturing of accountability, the involved actors’ conflict explanations in terms of ethnicity, gang culture, and “the first blow”, young people’s way of linking their self-control to the institution’s privilege system, and moral emotions as well as the significance of crucial details in the depicted course of events. The argument is not that staff should merely improve their routines of documenting events to really cover these or other facets of social life that are left behind at a detention home. Rather, the article attempts to explore why and in what sense institutional writing is incompatible with more informal, personal, and local accounting procedures.
Highlights
What happens when social life is written down? Ethnographers sometimes argue that “down” is the wrong word
We discovered that treatment assistants writing “up” the daily life of young people in a ward were recurrently “zooming in” on the young people’s behavioral problems, they took detailed notes on their mood and mood changes, and routinely hid troubles or circumscribed staff agency and instead focused quite exclusively on how young people choose to act
I could recognize bits and pieces and compare them with my observations and interviews, but most of the occasions in the casebook journal we studied still seemed to belong to a quite exclusive textualized world, fairly separate from what I had seen myself as a participant observer or what was uttered in my interviews
Summary
What happens when social life is written down? Ethnographers sometimes argue that “down” is the wrong word. After having identified an event, for instance some guys fighting over a remote control in front of the TV at a ward (i.e., the case in this article), we tried to interview the individuals involved, the staff who came running to calm them down, the staff member who was present in the room from the beginning of the interaction, and we asked for the written electronic casebook notes on this very event This made it possible to analyze the rhetoric of institutional texts per se and some of the discrepancies between, on the one hand, oral and relatively spontaneous accounts of a drama in research interviews and, on the other hand, a piece of formal text about the “same” issue. Some things are written up and remembered ( by staff), some are not
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